Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Wyoming
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The seasonality of Earth results in a tapestry of resource waves across space and time. Most notable are the waves of snowmelt and plant green-up moving altitudinally and latitudinally in temperate ecosystems each spring. Migratory animals capitalize on resource waves by fine-tuning their movements with the ebb and flow of resources. With increasing variation in weather and temperature patterns, the consistency of phenological events, and hence resource waves, will inevitably change in complex ways.
This project is a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Wyoming, the Wyoming Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit, NASA, and the U.S. Geological Survey. This project will develop an automated analytical system that utilizes high-end computing to calculate derived metrics of environmental predictability – such as timing of green-up, brown-down, snow melt, winter severity, etc. – from relatively long-term remote sensors and algorithms (e.g., MODIS, SNODAS, PRISM), which will provide researchers, wildlife managers, and land managers access to derived metrics of environmental phenology and variability based on decades of earth surface monitoring.